About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which owns around 80K domain names and whose retail site is at MostWantedDomains.com. Michael is also a Director of RightoftheDot.com which is a consultant in the new gTLD space and a broker of super premium domains. Michael Is also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest at #Internetofficial

I got the video’s message in 30 seconds. Which makes the other 7 minutes and 30 seconds of this video overkill (perhaps that was the point).

Look, I’m not a fan of thousands of proposed gTLD’s either. However, I believe a few gTLD’s have merit. For example, just like dot.org has a useful role/purpose, I believe dot.xxx has a useful role/purpose.

I would like to see a few extensions, not thousands, which have useful roles/purposes, maintained. Dot.com for general commerce. Dot. org for non-profits. Dot.gov for government. Dot.xxx for adult content. And so on. But even a lot of current extensions seem redundant to me.

What’s the point of dot.net, dot.biz, dot.co and a host of others? They don’t fulfill a specific role/purpose. Dot.co offers nothing which dot.com does not. It’s just another version of the same thing. It offers no specifc content distinction.

The same could be said for proposed gTLD’s like dot.web, dot.shop and dot.site. Again, there is no specific content distinction.

Dot.med for medical professionals? Sure. At least that could serve the role/purpose of being related only to medical content/advice/patients/professionals.

If I was in charge of granting extensions, I would set some STANDARDS. Does the proposed extension distinguish itself from all others? Does it serve a specific role/purpose? Is that role/purpose broad enough that it demands it’s own extension?

To use the example above, once you have dot.xxx there’s absolutely no need for dot.sex, dot.adult, or any other adult-related extension, because that becomes redundant. You can apply the same logic to several other broad catagories.

In summary, I’m no fan of the thousands of proposed gTLD’s either. Then again, I’m not a fan of some of the current gTLD’s. But if anyone thinks dot.com is the only extension with merit that’s absurd. We need several broad, catagory-specific, gTLD’s to help make sense of/organize the web.

Last example, country specific extensions. Completely unnecessary. The whole point of the web is to unify the World. That Canada has dot.ca is as nonsensical as America having dot.us. Who uses dot.us? Anyone?! We don’t need these distinctions. It’s a global market place. Web content should be divided into catagories, not countries.

But Clearly…….ICANNt’s dubious allowance & enabling of Sooooo Many & Tooooo many TLD’s is really No laughing matter… very irresponsible & ill conceived …. Could really screw up the fluency and overall experience of the Internet… and I’m talk’in bout the “entire net experience” and certainly not sloey the concerns of large domain portfolio holders.

These new domains are good for the average Joe to use because ALL dot com domains are either gone or cost too much to an average Joe.

Therefore, most new gTLDs operators such as Frank Schilling will be successful, but if you are planning on running a full business, you should do it on a dot com.

People need to stop comparing dot com and dot whatever…no need to compare…All we need to know is that the new gTLDs operators are going to be successful because there is a huge need for new domains for the newcomers and average Joes…

A well made video, that accurately confirms the fact that
domain names, that you currently refer to as domain “hacks”,
will become common-place in the next year or so.

Does that mean that ‘hack’ prices will go down?

No, quite the opposite!.. Hacks will become mainstream, and
2+2 character hacks like “ba.by” will explode in value, as they
will be seen to be much better than the gTLD option (that are
unable to use a 2 character domain ending).

Mildly funny at first, but underlying it is the patronizing message – consumers need to be protected from having to make choices, ‘cos they can’t cope with diversity.

Thank goodness we don’t allow car manufacturers to come up with new names for their products every year, or just think how lost those poor purchasers would be. And lets go back to one domain registrar – we don’t need 900, confusing registrants with multiple competitive offerings.

Inherently coupled with the protection idea is that there is someone better – wiser, with no self interest or bias- than the regulated market who should make these choices for us.

“As options multiply, there may be a point at which the effort required to obtain enough information to be able to distinguish sensibly between alternatives outweighs the benefit to the consumer of the extra choice. “At this point”, writes Barry Schwartz in “The Paradox of Choice”, “choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.”

Thanks Adam,
I don’t know what the quoted Car stats were actually counting as “models”, but I assume that by the time you multiply a “model” by say 10 colors to choose between, leather/not leather seating, plus 3 other options a consumer is actually faced with several tens of thousands of options.

The Paradox of Choice point has been criticized;
Here’s an extract from one critique, for those short of time.

“Over the past ten years, a number of such experiments have been done by academics to evaluate the asserted paradox of choice for product categories ranging from mp3 players to mutual funds, and a paper was published in February (Scheibehenne et al) that conducted a meta-analysis of 50 of them. (h/t Tim Harford) Across all of these experiments, the average effect of increasing choice on consumption or satisfaction was “virtually zero”. Further, this meta-analysis showed a positive average effect of increasing choices for those experiments that, like the jam experiment, tested the effect of choice on consumption quantity rather than some measure of satisfaction as the outcome. That is, when it comes to sales, more choice is better.”

And even if the point is correct – that one arrives at a point where the effort to discriminate does not yield better choices, that is not an argument for depriving people of the chance to offer those choices, or be exposed to them. Different consumers will have different thresholds. Consumer choice effort varies according to varying needs – at one point in my life I needed to know all about baby buggies. Later it was airline rewards programmes.

There is also a simple non-threatening solution for consumers facing overload – they will lapse into buying from one/a few brands they feel comfortable with – as most of us do when choosing soap powder, beer and brands of coffee.

After reading Mike Mann’s arrogant comment on the social.org story, I retract my statement above. With guys like Mike Mann out there (who snap up primarily dot.com domains with absolutely no intention of developing them) perhaps we DO need alternatives to dot.com. Otherwise, these cybersquatters profit at everyone else’s expense. Again, I don’t think we need thousands of gTLD’s, but we certainly need more options vs. paying cybersquatters (aka domain speculators) a king’s ransom.